Loftwall Blog

When the concept of the Open Office started gaining steam, and early adopters like Facebook and Google led the charge, a majority of employers jumped on board. The result, today Roughly 70 percent of U.S. employees currently work in an open office environment. The unintended consequence, privacy is slowly dying.

According to Forbes, 30 million Americans work from home at least one day of each week and one in three will be hired to work online from anywhere they want. This swift switch from the traditional “AIS” mentality (you can Urban Dictionary that acronym if you don’t know it) of old is starting to shape how companies design their office spaces. This increased autonomy, made possible mostly by technology and digital communication tools, is translating to employees having more control over where and how they work when they’re actually in the office. For those designing office solutions, the importance of flexibility can’t be ignored. Employees now require, if not demand, control of their surroundings.

If you’ve worked extensively in the tech industry, or even if you haven’t, chances are you work in an open office environment. Widespread in Silicon Valley, the trend of the open office took off as the unlikely marriage between two desires: keeping a tight budget and attracting talent. There was also a notable yearning for the places where the ideas for some of the most iconic tech companies originated, such as coffee shops and garages. The two primary motivating factors, budget and talent, seem incompatible at first glance. After all, providing all the free meals, transportation and recreational activities at Google takes more than a little monetary investment. But when you’re a measly tech startup on the edge of Palo Alto, paying for the real estate makes the idea of staying minimalist an attractive one. Even if you have the resources of a Facebook or a Google, the open office layout flourishes. Yet, like everywhere else in the country, the tech era is grappling with what office designs work best for the space.

Everyone gets distracted at work. In all honesty, this probably occurs multiple times a day. From text messages and emails to spontaneous conversations around desks, there’s almost no escape from at least some form of distraction in every work place. While people have direct control over some of those distractions (*cough cough* Facebook), there are also involuntary interruptions that spring up routinely, creating gut-wrenching losses in productivity. According to a study by Basex, distractions cost as much as $588 billion per year in the United States. There’s no scoffing at a number that size, and it’s a problem worth mitigating.

The balance of privacy and collaboration in the open office is a hot button subject that has been repeatedly discussed in our blog, among other places. The notion of privacy, though, has generally revolved around mitigating visual and auditory distractions. While this view of privacy is important and valid, there are several other components of modern office privacy that must be addressed as workplaces evolve. Employees are taking the path of least resistance to find what works best, and technology must be taken into account. When creating an open office, how much are you taking visual, auditory and virtual privacy into account?

The feedback from offices with an open office design is relatively consistent — there is an increasing need for privacy. On a more positive front, the open office has been a catalyst for employees gaining control over where and how they work. Find a common workspace too noisy? If noise-cancelling headphones aren’t in hand, many workers will opt to find a quiet space or an empty conference room to complete tasks that require focus. What the open office compromised in quality it made up for in stronger levels of collaboration and cultural cohesion. This doesn’t mean privacy can’t make a much-needed comeback, however. Here are three quick improvements dealers can make to change their open office design for the better.